No idea why you are down voted? You make a lot of sense ! I need to educate myself on ‘REDbook’ as the terminology is new to me. The marketing here reminds me of minidisc; I had about four players, a deck at home and one in my car. They actually sucked, as the floppy disc style enclosure filled with dirt. They were also responsible for my best friend’s worst car accident - I had given him my collection when I moved onto the creative labs ZEN mp3 player, my handwriting was so bad that he drove straight over a roundabout trying to find a metallica album 🤣

I approve of this approach as a trained physicist! Can you recommend a place to buy an album for download at >=96khz/24bit? I have a topping DAC which has a USB input, so I could go from laptop to DX7s . I purchased the DAC a long time ago, but I am not sure how much difference there can be in a newer/different model. I do know that I prefer the sound of my Marantz CD 63 mkII, through it’s onboard DAC, rather than going through the Topping and using the marantz as a transport.

Redbook CD? I wonder if I could buy a normal CD, but download any of my absolute favorites to a home server? I just dislike streaming; I want to own my media. I recently went through a health issue that meant I would go months and months not listening to anything, the whole time I was paying tidal ! Even when I am using tidal, I tend to reach for a record or CD 90 % of the time.

Thank you for your honest appraisal, I think I might be better to work with my vinyl and standard CD collection.

My taste in music is basically “anything that is excellent”. I have pantera sat next to Bach - Fugue in G minor, obscure german techno, lou reed, kate bush, dub side of the moon and a lot of classics. Music was my refuge growing up, so I consumed everything I could get my hands on.

All that money on headphones and they are not even surround sound.

Fully understand. I will give it a go with my topping dx7s dac as it has optical out. It sounds pretty great as it is to be honest! It is part of my very budget system: tannoy venus mk2, arcam alpha 8 and cd63 mk2. The arcam needed some connections resoldered/replaced, the speakers are very worn on the cabinets, but mechanically great and the CD player needed a new laser mechanism and belt. It came in at under 100 pounds, with the speakers costing just 10 !

I am stuck with it while I save for a new set of speakers and amp. I have my eyes on jbls with a rotel x7 but will audition when the time comes. I need to sort out portable audio first, as I am currently running a Sony professional tape deck and Chinese iems.

Thanks for the help.

Thank you. I guessed as much with the CD player, but had stumbled across a site that claimed to have made upgrades to it. I could always run it through my topping dac if I feel like it. I will have a good look at some tube amp designs and go from there. Thank you !